Thursday, January 10, 2013

The Old Republic Expansion

The Old Republic is releasing a mini-expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel. It costs $10 for subscribers, and $20 for non-subscribers. It has 5 levels and a new planet.

Sadly, the class stories are not continued, with only two storylines, Empire and Republic being offered.

The real question, in my mind, is how will this mini-expansion interact with the current endgame. TOR has built up a fair chunk of PvE endgame by now, and I can't imagine that this small piece of content can totally replace that. At best, I expect one or two flashpoints, and one operation. That doesn't sound like enough.

Maybe the power curve will be very flat, allowing the current endgame, or at least the latest two operations to stay relevant.

Why wouldn't it replace all of the current end-game? It's not like WoW still keeps it's old end-game stuff relevant after a 5-level expansion. And so much of the daily stuff was bolted on afterwards over time, so I could see the same thing happening with this expansion: Maybe one L55 daily zone at launch, with a few more bolted on as they add new raids.

Anyway, a comment on the forums suggested that the current end-game loot would carry one through to the new end-game. And given how the game currently gives you almost a full set of Tionese gear just for hitting L50, I do imagine that any levelling loot given during this planet will probably end up with players reaching maybe a little higher then Columni. So yeah, it likely will be fairly flat in terms of advancement.

If they bump the endgame content up, that forces all non-subscribers to shell out cash to play FP/Raids (which they already need to buy access to). So it could be an exercise to try to boost the subscription rate.

LOTRO has had this problem for a number of years now due to smaller expansions that look a lot like Makeb. Part of the slack just does not get picked up (i.e. I'd argue that LOTRO is not a great game to be a group player when viewed in terms of content), but beyond that the game relies heavily on content that scales with level.

It's also worth noting that SWTOR has six low-to-mid level flashpoints that I have never set foot in because they are not available as max level hard modes. That is presumably an untapped (if finite) resource for precisely this sort of occasion.